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Mozilla 1.7 to Become New Long-Lived Branch

iswm writes "MozillaZine has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk. Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality."

18 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. in other news ... : US Navy uses mozilla as well by heymjo · · Score: 4, Informative

    it had to happen sooner or later : mozillazine

  2. The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly... by pdcryan · · Score: 3, Informative

    The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly exaggerated...

    OS X's Camino hadn't been updated since March of '03 (.7 release), and personally I thought it had been put out to pasture thanks to Apple bundling Safari.

    According to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ we can look forward to .8 soon.

    Welcome back!

    --
    Ryan Kennedy opposes comm
  3. Contension by Jack+Comics · · Score: 5, Informative

    What the article fails to mention however that there appears to be a point of contension between Mozilla developers over whether or not the next long-lived stable branch of Mozilla should be 1.7 or 1.8. Many feel that it is too late in 1.7's development cycle to make it the next stable branch after 1.4. For more information, see here. It's a shame that the Mozilla Foundation apparently feels pressured to make decisions based on time frames instead of quality.

    --
    "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
  4. Problems... by arvindn · · Score: 5, Informative
    The blurb doesn't mention it, but quite a bit of dissatisfaction has been expressed about 1.7 becoming the next long lived branch, rather than 1.8. The issue seems to be that the APIs for this version are rather half-assed, which means that those who develop on the platform won't get a clean interface and will need to get used to some hacks and kludges.

    On the other hand people are happy that there's finally something to replace 1.4 which was showing its age.

    Note that this means that the next version of Netscape, if there is one, will be based on 1.7 etc.

    1. Re:Problems... by wnknisely · · Score: 4, Informative
      --
      In illa quae ultra sunt
  5. Re:The rumors of Camino's death have been greatly. by justMichael · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you are still using Camino .7, go grab one one of these.

    You will be amazed at the changes.

    Warning: Sometimes the daily is a bit of a mess, but I use it daily ;)

  6. Re:how exactly do they crash Mozilla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    1) Go to about:config.

    2) Select "Print Preview"

    3) Crash.

    On Firefox 0.8 on Windows 2000.

  7. Still doesn't work well for me by pcraven · · Score: 4, Informative

    I like using a lot of div tags and css styles. 1.7b is better with several bugs fixed. But this bug:

    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2041 93

    This one still makes me go back to IE. With the wrong setup, you can't access links for form controls. While the bug is marked as fixed in 1.7b, the test case I put in still fails.

    Go to CSS Zen Garden for learning by example on stylesheets. My pages mostly just have div tags any more, and the style sheet does the rest.

    (And why does Mozilla prevent links to it via Slashdot? If I create a link it says "Ook! Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.")

  8. Use Mozilla Baclup by bstadil · · Score: 3, Informative
    Why don't you install the nifty Mozilla Backup and your worries should be over.

    You can back-up everything incl Email and stuff

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  9. o.k but now the 1.7 stable has been pushed out by darthcamaro · · Score: 3, Informative

    Great news, but now the 1.7 stable release has been pushed back by a month. So, if FireFox is based on the 1.7 trunk it would mean that the FireFox 0.9 release will be pushed back too.
    It would have made more sense to make this decision before 1.7 hit beta, this is really an ass-backwards way of handling the stability of the trunk.

  10. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Gerv · · Score: 5, Informative

    The biggest problem such a person will face is the build system - as in, there isn't one for OS 9 any more.

    Gerv

  11. Re:No OS9 port means 60% of mac users stuck with 1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you hack macs, please do the silent majority a favour and port a stable version of mozilla for us!

    They have! It's called Web and Mail Communicator (WaMCom). They have produced a version of Mozilla 1.3.1 with hundreds of additional bugfixes that works on Mac OS 9.

    Sure, it's only based on 1.3.1 (though with extra bug fixes), but it's better than nothing.

    More details availble in these MozillaZine articles: 1 and 2.

  12. Re:Camino & Firefox by Quobobo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Camino is designed primarily to be an OS X port of Mozilla, so it integrates well into the OS. It has a completely native interface, and feels far more at home on a Mac than Firefox. It's essentially a non-question unless you're on a Mac, in which case you can just choose one.

  13. Re:Deleting bookmarks by lurking · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have seen this happen to a couple of clients machines I have worked on. I traced it down to their anti-virus scanner blowing out prefs.js. By excluding prefs.js from any virus scan activity they have not had the problem since.

  14. Re:What about the previous roadmaps for Firefox? by steeef · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's your answer (from the roadmap):

    We are not retiring the SeaMonkey [Mozilla] application suite, or its XPFE front end, in the foreseeable future. Several companies have shipped and will ship products based on this venerable component of the application suite, and on the entire suite. Many organizations deploy it or a derivative of it, such as Netscape 7.x. We intend to keep supporting these deployments in at least a conservative, sustaining engineering fashion. However, we still intend to focus on evolving Mozilla toward the more flexible application architecture pioneered by Firefox and Thunderbird. That's where our innovative engineering effort should go.

  15. Re:Oh glorious day! by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're not going read the article, or the links, then at least read the entire post. This is not a release notice.

    They're just saying that Firefox 1.0, when it is released, will be based on Mozilla 1.7. They aren't saying Firefox 1.0 is available.

    Yeesh!

  16. Re:Yeah, never mind the long life branch by poulbailey · · Score: 4, Informative

    > I think Phoenix was always supposed to be an internal codename like Whistler or Longhorn.

    The slight difference between the two names is that Phoenix wasn't trademarked. Firefox is. They spent a lot of effort on finding a proper name and trademarking it and are not going to abandon it anytime soon.

    They are keeping the name Mozilla Firefox. See the Firefox roadmap if you don't believe me:
    "Firefox 1.0 will be called simply "Mozilla Firefox"... or "Firefox" for short."

  17. Re:how exactly do they crash Mozilla? by abischof · · Score: 3, Informative
    1. Go to about:config.
    2. Select "Print Preview"
    3. Crash.

    That would be bug 218304 ("Print preview of about:config crashes"). FWIW, you'll have to copy-n-paste the address into your URL bar since Bugzilla refuses Slashdot referers.

    --

    Alex Bischoff
    HTML/CSS coder for hire